An explosive book about Kenya's
December 2007 bungled election has been launched in Stockholm. The book, Raila Odinga's Stolen Presidency: Consequences and The Future of
Kenya written by Mr. Okoth Osewe, a Kenyan author, takes the position that
the December 2007 election was rigged by the Samuel Kivuitu-led Electoral
Commission of Kenya (ECK) in favor of Mr. Mwai Kibaki who was immediately sworn
in as President in a hurriedly convened secret ceremony at State House Nairobi
on Sunday December 30th 2007. The disputed election precipitated a crisis that
led to the slaughter of an estimated 1,500 Kenyans and creation of 350,000
internal refugees.
According to the book, the rigging of presidential election
in Kenya
was masterminded by the corrupt "Kikuyu ruling class" that had formed an
impenetrable Mafia cartel around Kibaki and that worked in cahoots with ECK to
allegedly steal the vote to hand Kibaki victory.
Detailed backgrounds of a group of "Fat cats who kidnapped Kibaki's Presidency"
are given in the book with top names featuring Dr. Joe Wanjui, a long time
Kibaki ally, Kiraitu Murungi, Minister of Energy, John Michuki, Minister of
Environment, Chris Murungaru, former Internal Security Minister, Francis
Muthaura, Head of Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet and Njenga Karume,
former Defence minister. The "fat cats" are painted as corrupt and blamed for
having shielded the President soon after the December 2002 election in order to
maintain Kikuyu hegemony on power, promote corruption and perpetuate tribalism
in government.
Using figures of
Election returns from ECK and other sources, Mr. Osewe puts together a
formidable compilation and analysis of statistics to isolate 473,835 votes that
were allegedly added to Kibaki to give him victory with 4,584,721 votes over
Raila's 4,352,993 votes.
Names of ECK officials who were active at Kenyatta
International Conference Center where the tallying was taking place, together
with numbers of their IDs and cell phones are included in the compilation to
advance the theory that the election rigging was an exercise that was
masterminded by known people who knew what they were doing and who were acting
under clear instructions. International observers cast aspersions on the
credibility of results because of serious irregularities during the tallying
process especially at KICC.
The volume of a book, (464 pages long) claims that the
Kikuyu ruling class used ECK to rig elections because they were looting the
country's economy and plundering its resources through corruption and that if
they lost power under the circumstances, they were bound to lose the benefits
of having their man at State House with unforeseen consequences.
"Raila was set to
take over power after defeating Kibaki and given the evidence on corruption
that existed both at the official level and in the public domain, a driving
motive that could have led Kikuyu ruling class to rig elections must have been
the strong fear of prosecutions on corruption related scandals as promised by
ODM in its Election Manifesto", the book says.
US government
wanted to keep Raila Odinga out of power
Taking the unequivocal position that Raila won the vote, the
book details reasons why PNU, Kibaki's Party, was floored at the polls. The
book says that millions of Kenyan voters had become tired with a wealth-grabbing
Kikuyu ruling class that was perpetuating tribalism through organized
"Kikuyunization of government" as the masses of the Kenyan people went without
food, died of treatable diseases and suffered under high inflation occasioned
by run-away prices of consumer commodities.
According to the book, Kibaki was not in a position to
deliver on key election promises like ending corruption because corruption is
part of the system of capitalism that the Narc government inherited from Moi.
The book says that Kibaki could not end tribalism either because NARC, his party,
was ideologically bankrupt and therefore ill equipped to end tribalism. Mr.
Osewe argues that nobody will ever end tribalism in Kenya as long as there is no
alternative to it which, he says, is class based politics.
Although the book says that ODM had no better political
alternative to Kibaki's PNU, it argues that Kenyans voted for ODM because of
multiple illusions that had been built in the minds of Kenyans that ODM was
better than PNU. In reality, the book says that the two parties are
ideologically similar because they both practice politics from the point of
view of "deformed capitalism" while they both support unworkable policies of
Western imperialism which, the book says, are also responsible for the deep
economic crisis Kenya
has been plunged in for decades.
Within the mix of
Raila Odinga's stolen Presidency, the United States government is singled
out as having had a strong interest in keeping Raila away from power because the
Bush Administration was apparently uncomfortable with Raila. A deep analysis is
rendered in the book to explain why the US government congratulated Kibaki
soon after the vote was rigged at KICC.
For example, the book says that Raila made a big strategic
mistake in signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Kenyan Muslims to
the effect that no Muslim would be taken to Guantanamo
for interrogation and torture if he took power because in so doing, Raila was
undermining US foreign
policy and complicating US
government's self declared war on terror. This mistake, the book says, made the
US government uncomfortable
because Kenya "is a
political play ground" of the US
government and other European powers.
"Raila's deal with Kenyan Muslims amounted to drawing the
boundary as to what the US
government could and could not do in Kenya. The message Raila was
sending in the name of capturing the Muslim vote was that once he became
President, Kenya would no longer be a puppet of the United States, especially
on its war against terrorism", the book says.
The author's view is
that the ODM victory at the ballot represented a "generational revolt that
could topple imperialist status quo" in Kenya while it also says that if Raila
took power, there was "possible ideological challenges to imperialism" by new
anti-imperialist Parties and movements that could spring up in Kenya by
exploiting the democratic space that a Raila Presidency was bound to open. According
to Mr. Osewe, the US
government was comfortable with Kibaki, the Devil it knew and not Raila, the
Angel it didn't know.
The Kriegler Report
was a distortion of Kenyan history
In his attempt to "demolish the concept that the 2007
election was not rigged in favor of Kibaki", Mr. Osewe attacks the Kriegler
Commission that investigated the conduct of the election and takes the view
that the "Kriegler Report" (which concluded that the winner of the Presidential
election could not be determined) was "a distortion of Kenyan history" and an
insult to the intelligence of millions of Kenyan truth seekers.
The book says that
the Kriegler Report is dubious because it only investigated ten of the fourty
eight disputed constituencies; it never interviewed key returning officers in
areas of serious dispute, it kept alternative rebuttals from Civil society
organizations away; it invited dubious people to give "acceptable views"; it
ignored opposing views from certain dissenting Commissioners while it never examined
all available data on election rigging despite having had access to this data.
The book proceeds to
present missing data in the Kriegler Report from 37 Constituencies which Mr
Osewe analyses to expose rigging and to argue that the Kriegler Commission
cheated Kenyans because it had a pre-determined conclusion following the
signing of the National Accord and Reconciliation Act 2008. The Commission is
accused of violating known methods of scientific inquiry after setting its own
rules to produce a skewed Report because it had a set agenda to serve internal
and external interests.
"Although the
Kriegler Report was accepted because of political expediency, it is a major
distortion of Kenyan history, a drawback to the country's democratization
process, an insult to the intelligence of millions of Kenyans and a further
exposure of the ongoing conspiracy between the Kenyan ruling class and
Imperialism for the sake of "peace and continuity" that alone, can guarantee a
peaceful exploitation of the country's resources by local and international
wealth grabbers", the book states.
The book also delves
into the consequences of election rigging notably the resurfacing of the thorny
land question which, the book says, has never been resolved since Kenya's "flag
independence" in 1963. According to the author, the land question has never
been tackled because top politicians who have been holding power and their
foreign backers have been the leading land grabbers who will never address the
problem of landlessness because of vested interests.
In tackling the
problem of landlessness, the book says that it "will not just mean a shift in
government policy but a radical ideological change opposed to the free market
system of government that has converted land into a commodity for sale and
allowed a few fat cats to own vast pieces of land when millions of Kenyans are
landless".
Kenya:
The myth of peace in a conflict zone
Compared to its neighbors, the popular view is that Kenya has been
relatively peaceful. In the book, Mr. Osewe challenges what he calls "The myth
of peace in a conflict zone" and advances the view that behind the much touted
peace occasioned by lack of military conflicts, Kenya is the epicenter of multiple
social conflicts and contradictions which exploded following the stealing of
Raila's Presidency.
"The battle that
has been raging in Kenya and that rarely finds effective expression in the
world media is the battle between the rich and the poor, the "haves" and the
"have nots," the exploited and the exploiter, the powerful and the powerless,
the wealth grabbers and the robbed, the bellyful wanabenzi [Benz drivers] and
the hungry, the millionaire tycoons and the beggars in the streets, those with
food on the table and those starving, the business community and the paupers,
the fat land grabbers and the landless, the tiny wealthy ruling class and the
army of unemployed youth", the book says before giving a pessimistic
perspective of the future.
"The truth is that
the peace being trumpeted in this context has been an artificial peace because
conditions for peace have not been in existence in Kenya for decades and this
is how the situation will remain if key issues that led to the election of ODM
are not addressed either by present or future governments", says Mr. Osewe.
The book, whose
launch in Kenya
is in the pipeline, concludes with a perspective of Kenyan politics. It lists a
range of issues that the Coalition government will and will not be able to
address during its life while it also attempts to define the political
direction of the country in the run up to next elections.
Throughout his
presentation, Mr. Osewe's style of analysis betrays a clear leftist inclination
as he challenges basic concepts of free market in Kenya and "imperialist control" of
the country's politics, economy and culture. Although the author avoids the use
of Marxist jargon in his formulations, he leaves the informed reader with
little doubt about his ideological standpoint as a contemporary Kenyan leftist
thinker and writer.
While the book blames
politicians for being responsible for the country's malaise, it attempts to
shift attention to the political system which, it argues, needs to be changed
because, according to the book, it is this system that allows politicians to run
down the country and prompt them to rig elections when they are on the verge of
losing the vote.
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The problem we had, and which is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about is this: Even if the election had been clean and Kibaki had been declared the winner, would ODM have accepted defeat gracefully?
ODM made serious miscalculations as far as the Kenyan voter is concerned. First, they assumed that everybody in Kenya hates Kikuyus and that only Kikuyus would vote for Kibaki. This was informed by the 41-1 strategy.
The second mistake ODM made was to assume that they would get the same margin of votes that they got during the November 2005 referendum. The 2007 elections took place more than two years after the referendum and a lot of things had taken place to shift the minds of voters either way. Apart from that, continous voter registration meant there were people voting in 2007 that had not voted in 2005 and this was bound to affect the result.
The third mistake in ODM is, as the author puts it, getting into a MoU that would have given Muslim dominated areas some measure of autonomy. This alone scared the hell out of the estimated 60% of Kenyans who are Christians. That's not forgetting the implications of the MoU on the US led war on terror.
The fourth miscalculation made by ODM was the Majimbo debate. ODM announced its support for Majimbo in order to win votes from the Coast and parts of Rift Valley that favor ethnic homogeneity. Unfortunately, any call for Majimbo in Kenya will scare the living daylights out of all migrant ethnic groups. That explains why the Kikuyu, Kisii and Kamba could not vote for ODM as these are some of the ethnic groups that have migrated away from their ancestral areas. Luos supported ODM but those living at the coast had their misgivings about Majimbo because they were victims of ethnic clashes in 1997.
Was the election rigged? Well, it doesn't matter now because we can see that all of these politicians are just the same regardless of the political parties they bought in the last election.